


Red, Purple, White

by battle_cat



Series: Together [48]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Action, Canon-Typical Violence, Combat, F/M, Gen, Imperator Ace, Imperator Toast, Mad Max Secret Santa 2015, Post-Movie(s), Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 01:42:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5478653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Imperator Toast is out on her first supply run to the Bullet Farm in the new rig, and a distress flare has just gone up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red, Purple, White

**Author's Note:**

> My Mad Max Secret Santa gift for [ye11owhouse](http://ye11owhouse.tumblr.com/). Hope you enjoy!
> 
> Stop by [my blog](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com/) for more Mad Max.

“Imperator! Red flares on the horizon!”

The lookout, a War Girl not more than four thousand days old, is out of breath from running up the passageways to Furiosa’s room.

“You’re certain?” The girl nods, and as if on command, a blackthumb comes tumbling into the doorway behind her, equally winded.

“Flares from the north, calling for help,” he pants. And her heart is suddenly in her throat. Because the only convoy out to the north is Toast’s. Her first run to the Bullet Farm in the new rig. An ordinary supply run, in well-defended territory.

“Sound the alarm,” she says. “Rescue party. You—” to the War Girl. “Find Max.”

But she doesn’t need to, because wherever Max was, he is at the doorway now. “Saw the flares,” he mutters.

He is already grabbing his jacket from the bench, strapping on his pistol, while she loads every weapon in the room into her supply bag.

 

The drums are echoing through the Citadel, beating out the numbers of outriders and pursuit vehicles to be readied.

In the tumult of the garage, Ace is bellowing instructions while lancers and drivers rev up.

The Interceptor is first onto the lift, Max behind the wheel, Furiosa checking weapons even though she knows everything is loaded. The rest of the rescue party will be behind them, but they have the fastest car.

He fires up the supercharger on the way down and they tear out the second the lift hits the ground.

 

They are eating up sand, speeding north through silent desert while the smooth clear calm of adrenaline descends, keeping the world sharp and fear at bay. The SKS and five other weapons are ready within reach, and Max has the custom-made ammo box mounted on the dash, ready to reload anything she can fire.

Another flare goes up, from a spot out of sight over the low rolling dunes that lie between them and the Bullet Farm.

And her blood runs cold, because it’s the one she’s never needed to fire. The one they use so rarely they can afford to make it a strange color.

_Purple. Rig disabled._

“Faster,” she says, but he’s already fanged it.

 

The plume of smoke is visible when they round the next dune, thick and black and billowing.

Then they crest the top of a ridge and she sees it all. The rig is foundered up on the edge of the road, black smoke pouring from its engine, three wrecked outrider vehicles in its wake. One of the enemy cars, some kind of buggy she doesn’t recognize, lies blackened and smoking as well, skewered with spent thundersticks.

Toast is on top of the rig (exactly as she had taught her, Furiosa has time to think), on her belly with her rifle, lancers and gunners ready behind her for another attack.

A roar of engines approaching from the north—the attackers coming back for another pass. She aims the SKS out the window as they blast down the hill, spraying sand. Not as much range of motion as a sunroof, but the window will have to do.

Then the raiders are over the ridge—a heavy cluster of bikes—twelve? fifteen?—most riding double with a driver and a gunman. She spots rifles and shotguns and crossbows and slingshots and improvised killing tools she doesn’t have a name for.

She picks off three before they register there’s a new vehicle headed straight for them.

Dimly she registers a whoop from the War Boys on the rig, but the bikers’ guns are on them now and they both duck to avoid the hail of bullets that clanks off the car’s body.

She doesn’t see what makes Max swear and swerve hard, throwing her against him. It’s only after the projectile sails past them and explodes in a massive fireball on the sand that she realizes they have a rocket launcher.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Max agrees as they skid around the fireball.

“Rig’s full of ammunition.” Max gives her an eyebrow raise that’s part _oh shit_ and part _of course_. “One firebomb to the tanker and we’ll all be lizard food.”

The heat is incredible as they skirt the fire and go tearing back toward the rig. It’s no ordinary guzzoline bomb they’re firing, but something that burns blistering hot for minutes and belches black smoke that makes her light-headed.

They’re around the smoke and she takes out two more bikers as soon as she can see them, and she sees the rocket-launcher car, an armored-up buggy with the launcher fired by a wild-haired man taking cover behind a metal shield. It’s faster than you would think and corners well and dodges the thundersticks from the rig.

The bikes and the launcher car peel off out of range, circling around behind the dune they just came over for another pass—

And then—a scream from the top of the rig—

“Stop, stop!” she yells at Max, braces when he slams on the brakes, and she’s ignoring his yell of protest as she tears out of the car. “Get that launcher!” she shouts as she runs, and hears the Interceptor peel out behind her.

 

Toast hears the roar of the bike—the bike that mounted the dune behind them—but it’s the thud of it landing on top of the rig that makes her turn, and then it’s too late. Her War Boys are wrestling the gunner off and away but the driver takes a flying leap and lands on top of her, and instinct says to block the incoming blow instead of grabbing for a handhold and they’re falling.

The ground drives the breath out of her, and before she can recover the driver has her up against the rig. In a flash she sees it’s a woman, leather-faced and feral, strong enough to lift her kicking off the ground.

A thousand drills in the sparring room mean she can find the knife on her belt without looking, whip it around and bury it under the woman’s jaw before she has time to think.

She stumbles back in shock as the woman collapses, a futile hand over the bloody wound, and she almost doesn’t duck in time to avoid the blow that comes from the driver of one of the felled bikes.

His fist slams into the side of the rig two inches above her head. She steps forward aiming the knife under his arm, but he’s on the same page, grabs the knife hand and twists, sending a slice of pain up her arm, kicks her down into the dirt and is almost on top of her when someone yells, “Hey!”

He makes the mistake of turning and gets a rifle butt in the face, then a metal fist, twice. He falls and doesn’t move.

Furiosa’s hauling her to her feet and handing her the rifle she dropped and pushing her toward the nearest of the rig’s wheels. Her face and neck are already splattered with blood but it doesn’t look like it’s hers.

The sound of bikes approaching again.

“Under the wheels. Take out as many as you can on this pass. Aim for the drivers.”

She’s climbing into the cab of the rig, swinging the door out for cover.

 

Furiosa feels under the dash and yes, the Glock is still there where it should be, and the extra clip for it, and a handful of rounds that will fit the SKS.

“How many thundersticks left?” she yells up to Scrapper, Toast’s second-in-command on top of the rig.

“Four,” comes the bleak reply.

“Save them,” she says as she reloads the rifle. “Take cover.”

The bikes roar into a hail of gunfire. She empties the rifle, then the Glock, but she counts at least four make it through. She ducks, reaching for the extra clip, when she hears the familiar engine.

The launcher car is barreling toward them, the Interceptor on its heels, then pulling even. The mouth of the launcher swings right at them, and there’s no time to move.

“No!” the launcher-firer’s comrade yells, shoving the tube upward at the last moment. The firebomb sails over their heads and smashes into the sand dune behind them. The Interceptor pulls even with the launcher car and Max takes out the driver with a single shot. The car swerves; the Interceptor pulls in front of it.

Hands grab Furiosa from behind and haul her out of the cab.

She fights, landing elbows and hits with the empty gun wherever she can, buckles a knee with a hard kick, and then it’s a rough desperate scrabble on the ground that ends with her on top.

It’s one of the bikers—driver or gunner, she doesn’t know, but his only weapon is bare hands now. They’re on her throat but hers are on his too and one of hers is metal.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Toast is fighting her own battle with another attacker, twice her size.

She gets her fingers under his left hand and dislocates the thumb, a snap and a howl, but his right hand's grip is too strong for her to break one-handed, dirty nails digging into her skin, fueled by desperation.

Her vision grays at the sides; she leans her weight harder into the metal hand until she feels the telltale crunch of cartilage and bone. His expression is shock, then fear, then nothing.

His hand goes slack on her throat and she rolls onto the sand, gasping, willing herself not to black out.

She hears the whoosh of a firebomb overhead, then screams.

_Get up._

A War Boy is rolling on the sand, trying to extinguish his burning pants.

_Get up._

Toast is pinned down by her attacker. She looks to the side and Max is fighting three guys at once on the launcher car.

_You have until three to get up. One, two—_

She hauls herself to her feet, head spinning, breath raw.

 

Toast kicks furiously at the man on top of her, but he’s heavy and she needs both hands braced against the ground to keep him from crushing her throat with the barrel of the empty rifle jammed under her chin, and she can feel focus giving way to panic because of course, _of course_ this would be it, held down by someone bigger than her, everyone is bigger than her, why had she thought she had a chance—

She hadn’t even realized she’d closed her eyes, but she feels rather than sees hot blood splatter her face. When she comes back to her senses, Furiosa is pushing a body with a slit throat off her, bloody knife in her flesh hand.

 _That’s twice now_ , she thinks bitterly.

 

Furiosa looks up at Max just as the fight drags him out of sight onto the floor of the launcher car. She runs, knife in hand, every breath in her bruised throat like inhaling glass.

Before she can close the distance he appears again, alone, breathing hard, knuckles smeared with blood. She heaves a sigh of relief in the second before she sees one of the attackers stagger to his feet behind him.

 _Crack._ The man falls with a thud.

She turns toward the source of the shot. Toast has the Glock she dropped in the sand, loaded now and perfectly steady in her hands.

Max’s head turns north, animal-like. The sound of the last four bikers approaching once more, desperate enough to inflict more damage after they’ve lost.

She’s up on the car, swinging the launcher around; it’s loaded and she’s watched them fire it enough to know how it works. She fires it point-blank at the closest bike.

The fireball is enormous, and the screams are terrible. Max puts a bullet in the driver’s head out of mercy.

The rest of the bikes are skidding, wheeling around away from them, and she thinks they’ve finally given up, but then there’s a whoop from behind her and a thunderstick sails overhead, and the first outriders of the rescue party are streaming around them. The rest of the party hurtles toward them in a cloud of dust.

She exhales a shaky, still-painful breath.

A soft finger brushes her neck, in between the scratches from the man who tried to choke her.

She looks over at Max, blinking twitchily, trying to return to himself. Laces blood-spattered fingers in between his.

“M’okay,” she rasps. “You?” He nods. A brief spasm of his hand against hers.

She stumbles back over to the rig, suddenly aware that her head is throbbing, from the choking or the smoke or a blow she doesn’t remember, or maybe all three.

Toast is still in the spot where she fired the last shot from the Glock. The shaking has set in hard. “See to your crew,” she tells her. An Imperator learns ways not to shake.

She picks up the flare gun from the floor of the cab, puts a white flare in it and sends it up above them. For the rescue party, and those who will be watching from the Citadel.

_All clear._

 

The rescue party swirls around them, taking positions on high ground and inspecting damage and checking on mates on the crew.

By some fucking miracle, no one is dead. But one of the younger boys—Winch, she thinks his name is—caught a splash from one of the firebombs. She finds Toast crouching beside him, her face twisted, blood still smeared across it.

It’s an ugly burn, up and down his leg, and his pants have sort of fused to the burned skin. He’s delirious with pain.

“Here.” She wipes drying blood off her knife and cuts into his pants above the burn, so they can move him without tugging at the burned skin. They’ll peel him like a roasted lizard if they aren’t careful.

“By my deeds…I honor you…Imperator,” he mumbles blearily.

“You’ll be okay,” she lies, and because it will matter to him, she leans down and conks her forehead against his. She’s not wearing any grease but the thought is still there. He gives her a tight smile.

Burns mean shock and infection and dead tissue, problems for which they have few remedies.

“Go very easy when you move him,” she tells one of his mates quietly. “If he passes out, let him.”

 

Ace had arrived with the rescue party, and stands surveying the damage, black scarf pulled over his face against the smoke. “No reinforcements from the Bullet Farm,” he muses when Furiosa walks up to him. It’s closer than the Citadel; she can see the smoke plumes from here.

“Deal with that problem tomorrow,” she sighs. Her voice is hoarse. He hands her a canteen without prompting.

“You’ve got…” He gestures vaguely around his head and neck.

She knows. She’s covered in blood. She unfolds the scarf tucked into her belt and wipes her face.

“Lotta firepower, for a pack of raiders,” Ace says.

Now that she has a second to breathe, she sees the map of the attack in the wreckage around them and registers how well-planned it was.

Take out the lead car first, forcing the rig to swerve into the soft sand where it would have to slow down. Disable the engine with the firebombs, but don’t damage the cargo. They must have known what the tanker was carrying, if they’d taken such pains not to hit it with their bombs.

She takes a closer look at the nearest body. They had been well-armed, and their clothes and vehicles bore no marks she recognized.

They hadn’t stumbled across the rig; they had come to hunt it down.

The fire on the front of the rig has gone out enough that she can examine the blackened hull. It had burned hot enough to melt the front tire. The plow was down but the engine had overheated before sand could smother the flames.

It’s not every day someone figures out how to disable one of her rigs. She finds herself grimly impressed.

“Strip anything useful from the bodies, then burn them,” she tells Ace.

 

Max is still on the buggy, figuring out how to remove the launcher from the mounts. He hands it down to her.

She can’t help flipping open a panel, noting how the trigger is connected to a sparking mechanism that lights the fuse on the way out of the tube, so one person can fire it without pausing to light the bombs first.

It’s ingenious, really.

Max lifts up a crate of the firebombs from the bottom of the car: thick glass jars, each loaded with a fuse and a primer charge. Once she picks one up she can see the mixture inside is more the consistency of crude oil than guzzoline.

He gives her a questioning eyebrow-raise.

“Put ‘em in your car. Don’t want War Boys getting their hands on them.”

“You’re not _keeping_ it?” Toast is beside her. Winch is being loaded onto the medical buggy. Mercifully, he’d fainted as soon as they picked him up.

She lifts the launcher onto her shoulder. Light enough for one person, if you made a good shoulder rig, she notes. 

“You’d rather someone else have it?”

 

The giant salvager is hooking its tow lines up to the rig, ready to head back to the Citadel. Her crew clusters on the salvager platforms around the rig, as if it’s a wounded comrade they all want to help carry.

Furiosa stands by the heap of bodies they’re leaving behind. As Toast watches, she takes something small out of a pocket and shakes it in her hand.

It’s chrome spray. She hasn’t seen much of it, since they’d found out it was a drug. But Furiosa has a can of it.

She wraps her scarf over her face to avoid inhaling it as she paints something on the sand next to the pile of bodies. A circle with a triangle topped with a crescent inside it. The boltcutters, the new symbol of the Citadel.

“Thought we weren’t like that anymore,” Toast says.

“We might be different, but the world’s not.” Furiosa’s jaw is set. “Every smeg with a gun will be coming for us if they think we’re soft.”

She pulls Toast back away from the pile of bodies. Nods to Ace, who has a flare in his hand. The kind you light on the roadside, not the kind you fire. Toast realizes the stench of guzzoline is because the bodies have been drenched with it.

“Light it,” Furiosa says.

 

The Interceptor takes up the rear of the returning convoy this time.

Furiosa is silent and Max finds his gaze flicking toward her more than usual. To make sure she’s okay. To make sure she is really still there, alive.

Her throat is starting to bruise.

“Should clean that,” he mutters, nodding at her scratches.

“Yeah. You’ve got a few too.”

The desert sails by in silence, the hills by the Citadel visible on the horizon.

“Think he’ll keep the leg?” he asks after a while. 

“Dunno.” Her face is closed and hard.

The glass bottles, full of fire in waiting, clink softly in the car behind them.

Adrenaline is still pounding through his bloodstream. It will take hours to come down, he knows from experience.

It’s easy to get used to it, and even to like it: the superhuman feeling of reflexes running ahead of conscious thought, the sharpening of senses and the dulling of pain. It’s only later that the screams and the smell of blood and fire drag at you.

 

They arrive to find Toast surrounded by a crowd of War Boys, her own and others. She had ridden back in the driver’s seat of the wounded rig, at her crew’s insistence. The atmosphere is hushed, awed and a little frightened, as if they’re shocked to see one of their war machines so mortally wounded, but still standing.

Then Toast opens the door of the rig and Scrapper yells from somewhere in the crowd: “All hail Imperator Toast!” There’s cheering and Toast looks confused.

“All hail Imperator Toast, who defended her rig and her crew against the feral wasteland scum! May they all live to fight many shine battles and go to Valhalla with many klicks on their meters!”

A roar goes up from the crowd, cheers and V8s and Toast lifted onto someone’s shoulders.

She looks like she is in no mood to be hailed.

“You did everything I would have done,” Furiosa tells her when she extracts herself from the crowd, even though, strictly speaking, she does not know that that is true. “You just got unlucky.”

Toast’s face is scrunched up in that way it gets when she’s trying not to cry.

“Clean yourself up,” she says, because Toast’s face is still smeared with someone else’s blood. “Harder to get off once it dries.”

 

Ace is ensuring the last of the pups have put away all the war supplies properly when he hears someone banging around in the repair bay. He follows the sounds until he finds Toast, in the middle of throwing most of the contents of one of the big toolboxes against the wall.

“Oy!”

He grabs her around the middle as she reaches for a tire iron, hauls her away from the supply of projectiles while she screams, “Get off me!” and kicks.

“Got somethin’ against us having functional tools?” he says as her sets her down.

“Sorry,” she mutters. But then she sends a wrench clattering across the bay.

“Attacked on my first run out. Fucking _mediocre!_ ” she storms, and gods, she reminds him forcefully of a certain War Girl at times. She picks up another wrench.

“Ahh, hey now.” He pries it out of her hands. “Got a better idea.” He fishes in a pocket and holds out a flask.

She considers for a moment, then sits on the runner board of the nearest vehicle, looking suddenly defeated. Takes a swallow from the flask and grimaces. “Tastes like paint thinner.”

“Paint thinner’d go down easier, I reckon.” He sits next to her. Her face is still stormy. But she hands him the flask.

“She was too, y’know.”

“What?”

“Attacked on her first run. Buzzards. Half her crew, gone in one run. Poof. Valhalla. ‘Course, that was back before, when boys couldn’t wait to go out historic. But still. You did better’n her on that front.” He passes back the flask.

“I panicked.” She takes another swig to hide the twitch on her face. “I didn’t know what to do when the engine died. I froze and I let them catch up to us.”

“Think you learn how to do war in a day?” He drinks. “Seems like you did all right, from what I hear.”

“I’d’ve been dead if she hadn’t been there. At least twice.”

Ace shrugs. “We got distress flares for a reason. Proud man is a dead man in the Wasteland.” He looks at her. “Or woman.”

She scuffs her boot on the stone floor. It has dried blood on it. “Never killed anyone, before today.”

“Make you feel all shine?”

She keeps seeing the woman’s face, the terror in her eyes, the frantic hand over the arterial blood pumping out between her fingers. Even though she had to; it was one of them or the other; she knows that.

“No.”

“Yeah.” He hands her back the flask. “That’s cause you’re smart.”

 

They have scrubbed themselves clean of all the blood and soot, although the scent of burning flesh still lingers, hard to erase from memory. 

Being naked is the easiest way to find all the little cuts and scrapes that need cleaning.

He dips a cloth in the disinfectant mix from the infirmary and presses it carefully against the scratches on her neck. “I know, I know,” he murmurs when she grits her teeth against the sting.

She is stoic and silent, a steel cable at its snapping point, but she swabs his scraped knuckles and elbow and the little shrapnel scratch over his eyebrow with impeccable attention. When he brushes his lips against her forehead her brow wrinkles up, and he puts the next kiss there as if he can smooth it out.

When he reaches her lips some internal barrier breaks, and she is suddenly hungry, but still completely silent.

She urges them back onto the mattress, and he tries his best to go gently because they’ve both got bruises. She curls a hand around his cock and strokes him hard, but pushes his hands away every time he reaches for her, until she pins his wrists down with hand and elbow and he just leaves his hands there, open, a surrender.

When she takes him inside her and grinds down she is quiet as the desert night, just a rhythmic huff of hard breathing, over and over, her eyes closed the whole time. Only when he sneaks a hand up to find her clit at the very end does she make a tiny sound.

It’s only after, when she lies heavy and still on top of him, that she’ll let him run long sweeping strokes over her back, to remind himself that they’re both warm and breathing and still here.

 

It scares her to her core, any time she starts to think about how much she’s come to count on him being by her side. Not just as her other half in a fight, but as the person who won’t flinch away from her when she’s covered in blood.

Because she feels all too sharply how it could be gone in a second—a reflex a hair too slow, a single misstep on a moving vehicle—and she doesn’t know how she could bear it. It would be so hard, to start carrying all that weight again herself.

_Don’t think about that._

She never would have survived if she’d dwelt on all the bad things. He is here now, breathing steady with his arms around her, and that will have to be enough.


End file.
